Tag Archives: Magical Unicorns
I hesitate to use the word epic, but…
…I’m about to give away a boatload of e-books!
Today is my 2-year Indieversary – yup, that’s right, I’ve been an indie/ self-published author for two years. Happy book birthday to Glimpse!!
Normally, this would be the paragraph where I lay a bunch of sweet stats on you and be inspiring to other writers and what-not, but I suck at keeping track of stuff. (I hear the third year [I'm totally lying] is when you get control of your indie career. I’m expecting to wake up tomorrow being able to make spreadsheets and do my taxes without using “guesstimates.”)
I’ll just say this: I’m doing great, my job rocks, I’ve met a lot of cool people who I now consider friends, and I earn enough to buy what I want. (Excluding $700,000 farms. C’mon, I’m not Amanda, for crying out loud!)
So, yay, Happy Indieversary to me! Let’s get to the giveaway!!
There are three prize levels.
Grand Prize – 26 ebooks!
Exiled by RaShelle Workman, Running Wide Open and Getting Sideways by Lisa Nowak, Transfer Student and 13 on Halloween by Laura A.H. Elliott, Watched and Protected by Cindy M. Hogan, Tangled Tides by Karen Amanda Hooper, Sleepers by Megg Jensen, The Green by Karly Kirkpatrick, Beautiful Demons and Inner Demons by Sarra Cannon, Clockwise by Elle Strauss, BECOME by Ali Cross, Destined by Jessie Harrell, Open Minds by Susan Kaye Quinn, Dream Smashers by Angela Carlie, The Secret of Spruce Knoll by Heather McCorkle, The Veil by Cory Putman Oakes, How to Date an Alien by Magan Vernon, BOUND by C.K. Bryant, A Spy Like Me by Laura Pauling, The Soulkeepers by G.P. Ching, Unenchanted and The Iron Butterfly by Chanda Hahn, Artemis Rising by Cheri Lasota
First Prize – 15 ebooks!
Exiled, Running Wide Open and Getting Sideways, Transfer Student and 13 on Halloween, Watched and Protected, Tangles Tides, Sleepers, The Green, Beautiful Demons and Inner Demons, Clockwise, BECOME, Destined
Second Prize – 11 ebooks!
Open Minds, Dream Smashers, The Secret of Spruce Knoll, The Veil, How to Date an Alien, BOUND, A Spy Like Me, The Soulkeepers, Unenchanted and The Iron Butterfly, Artemis Rising
Fill out the entry form below. All that’s mandatory is that you leave a blog comment with your e-mail, but if you “Like” and/or Tweet about the giveaway, you get extra entries.
Good luck and may the odds be ever in your favor. (Hey, it’s my indieversary. I can be a total dork, more than usual, if I want to.)
Much love and thanks to all of you!
#ROW80 update and Green Acres
Just a quickie update today because I have to clean my house. One of the things I said I’d do when I started making decent money as a writer was hire someone to clean my house a couple of times a month – well, the cleaning lady was supposed to start last week, but she got the flu, so my house is extra disastrous. I’m pretty sure the second I clean, she’ll call to reschedule. It’s the way of my world. 
I’m not entirely sure of my word count this week – it’s around 2.5K. I tried doing my timer writing and writing without editing and…I sat down yesterday and didn’t time myself and started rewriting/cutting Unfavorable from the beginning…it’s not finished, but the first scene is a lot better and I got some enjoyment out of the process. Ha! My brain just really wants me to let it fix things in the moment. I keep working to retrain it, but she’s a stubborn bitch.
Another thing my brain is, is super obsessive. I had a dream that I bought a farm and then when I woke up I looked up farms for sale in my area and there is a huge one for a good price nearby. (And by good price I mean not a million dollars – it’s not something that I can actually afford.) Anyway, I drove by it. Then I drove up to the house and checked it out. Today I’m going to the open house and then taking the kids over to a friend’s farm down the road a bit so we can see how they manage it.
I have a hard time letting ideas go and I’ve learned to let myself just be a crazy person and dream about them until the last possible moment when my rational side kicks in and says, “hey, it ain’t gonna happen.”
It’s just thinking, right?
So, that took up some of my week too, but the farce ends today and I’ll be back to trying to figure out how to afford to put a new roof on the house I already own – which takes up way less creative brain space than dreaming about being a lavender farmer.
Every time I say quick post, I babble endlessly.
Enjoy your Sunday!
Happy Easter, Paperback Action, and #ROW80
Good morning and Happy Easter! I’ve got a crapton of eggs to devil, so I’ll get right to it.
The Zellie paperbacks have new inside and outside designs. (The story is the same – no matter how many people complain, the park bench scene stands. lol)
All of the books now have the blue sparkly e-book covers and I finally figured out how to make the page numbers start on the first page of the actual book instead of the literal first page. The covers are just starting to show up on Amazon and will probably take a while to show up everywhere else – they might, in fact, never show up on Barnes and Noble, as they still have the First Edition covers up. We’re on the Third Edition here, people, catch up!
(I’m too lazy to make the files small enough to download here, but if you’d like to seem them they are up here. Robin Ludwig is AWESOME!!)
At any rate, if you’ve been waiting around for me to change the paperback covers to look like the e-book covers, I’ve done it. Please help spread the word.
ROW80: I’ve had a pretty good first week. After a bit of a timer malfunction on Monday – my Focus Booster timer disappeared from my screen, but kept going off randomly for a couple of hours and scaring the crap out of me – I downloaded a proper Pomodairo timer and that’s worked out better.
Monday – Wednesday I wrote each day, although I didn’t make it the full two hours. I averaged about an hour. I’m still keeping the goal at two hours, but not beating myself up if I don’t make it there.
Thursday and Friday I didn’t get any writing in at all because I was working on reformatting the paperback interiors. I didn’t expect that it would take me that long, but I format for paperback maybe twice a year, so I forget things from one instance to another.
Saturday I got four and a half hours of writing in. In addition to timing myself, I’m also trying to write without editing as I go. Ouch. It hurts. I wanted to attempt to finish the first draft of Unfavorable last night, but I was literally writing nonsense by the end of it and decided to go clean some Parenthood off the DVR instead. I’ve got nearly 5K for the week and that’s great for me. I’m hoping to do the same this week, or even 10 K and get Unfavorable done.
I am dying to work on Found.
Oh, Sexy New Ideas.
Spazmatron 5000 and #ROW80
Good morning! Okay, it’s 11, but I got to sleep in until 9, thus my morning is still new. I slept for ten hours last night and have maybe never needed it more. While I was jealous of all the Halloween parties my friends and family were attending, I woke up this morning refreshed and not hung over, so there is a plus to being a boring grown-up once in a while.
Have I mentioned that Glimpse is Free on Amazon? (Like, EVERYWHERE.) Sorry for being so annoying, but I just can’t help it! I’ve had over 5K downloads since Friday evening and it’s making me a spazmatron 5000. Right now it’s holding steady at #16 overall in Free and is #1 in both Contemporary Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magic. Can you all frickity-frackin’ believe that?
Thank you SO much to everyone for tweeting about it and posting on Facebook and other places – www.woot.com – who knew? I have no doubt that all of you made those 5K downloads happen.
If you’re over me and my spazziness, take heart, I’m sure someone will write a review on Goodreads soon calling me a no-talent fuck-up and then I’ll go back to being my normal, sedate self.
*snort* That is so not true. Is this your first time reading this blog?
ROW80 Act-shun!:
Wrote the pants off of my pen name short story this week and got that puppy edited, beta read and published on Friday and Saturday. My alter ego is pleased that she’s already sold a handful of copies.
Added another 253 words to my Death by Chocolate story last night – mostly pumping up the description and adding more back story to the first scene. Nothing on Dissent or the Glimpse pilot this week.
Worked on the pen name website, PacNWYA website and wrote a blog post for the DBC blog.
I’m taking the day off from writing today, because at this point I wouldn’t even let a hoarder into my house I’m so embarrassed by the state of it. The kids laundry is done, but I haven’t done my own laundry since the beginning of October!
Thanks, Sarah, for the 8 new pairs of hand-me-down jeans. I couldn’t have survived or clothed my lower half without them.
I’ll talk at you all again on Wednesday, but will be missing next Sunday’s check-in as I’ll be at the beach with my ladies doing 8-counts, drinking cheap beer and eating Combos.
Happy Halloween and thank God October is almost over!
Doughnut overload and #ROW80
It’s only been since Wednesday that I last blogged, but it feels like it’s been weeks! Since Wednesday, I’ve made a Rain Boots Required stop at West Linn Public library and spent two long days at the Wordstock festival in Portland.
Dudes and dudettes, so much has happened!
The tour stop in West Linn was fabulous. We had another great turn out and this time our audience was filled with actual young adults. They asked great questions – about writing and publishing and technique. Watch out, y’all, the next crop of writers are gonna be some savvy upstarts!!
Thanks so much to Elaine, the Teen librarian at WLPL. She made us feel so welcome and she is such a dedicated and awesome librarian. The kids of West Linn are lucky to have her and her bosses on their side. The teen section of their library is a place that I know I would’ve loved to spend time in as a YA because I’m now having fantasies about escaping to there as an adult.
My apologies to Lisa Nowak and Laura Elliott for my less than stellar AV skillz. I think we can all agree I shouldn’t be in charge of taping the talks anymore!!
Saturday and Sunday were spent at Wordstock from 10-6. We had VooDoo Doughnuts at our table and let me tell y’all, doughnuts are the great equalizer. We talked (and talked and talked and talked) to so many people who might not have stopped by our booth if it wasn’t for those crazy doughnuts.
I shared a booth with authors Angela Carlie and Laura Elliott. Lisa Nowak was at another booth, but she popped over frequently to hang out. We had such a blast!
Since I had to register the booth name before we had even named our author tour and I wasn’t sure who exactly was going to share it with me, I named it Pacific Northwest YA Authors. Good name, right?
Plenty of folks thought so. In fact, a lot of people thought we were an organization and wanted to join. At first, we laughed about it and told them we just needed a name for our booth, then, well it occurred to us that maybe we were an organization of sorts. More of a group, but we had authors wanting to join and librarians and teachers wanting us to come give talks at their schools.
Never one to turn down an opportunity…
I give you Pacific Northwest YA Authors.
The website and e-mail address were created on Saturday night when I couldn’t sleep but for thinkin’. Today, we signed up four schools/libraries to give talks at and collected over 20 e-mail addresses from people who want to receive our newsletter.
There’s just a welcome post up there right now, but by the end of this week I should have all of our Abouts, videos, reference links, contact info., guidelines for joining, etc. up.
Another awesome thing that happened at Wordstock besides networking our asses off, was that Lisa Nowak noticed the Trends in Publishing panel was the most well attended one of the whole event. And you know what? The panelists talked about self-publishing, but didn’t have a ton of experience with it. So, Lisa and I tracked down the incoming director of Wordstock and pitched her a self-publishing panel for next year. She seemed into it and said we were the first people to pitch her a panel for the following year. Who knows what will come of it, but I can’t stress enough that it never hurts to ask for what you want!
ROW80 update: If you’ve stuck around, I have good thangs to share about this too! (Seriously, I had three doughnuts today and am soooo high on the sugar!!) I talked about my decent word count for Tuesday on Wednesday. Yay! On Thursday, I fired up my new Final Draft software.
Guys, I’m in love. Yes, I actually heart software.
Although my ultimate dream would’ve been to pick a TV format and then copy and paste what I’d already written directly into it, what I got was pretty close. I selected the script format that they use on Grey’s Anatomy and copy and pasted line by line what I’d written so far. Voila! Formatted script. So easy to use. I spent the last hour of my writing time creating new stuff for the script. It’s such a fun project because I get to rewrite my book without having to actually rewrite my book. Writing new dialogue for the Rosedell gang made me absolutely ecstatic. There’s a new conversation between Avery and his best friend Jason that had me laughing my butt off. It’s fun to be back in Zellie’s world in a new way.
Okay, I’m off to work on the PacNWYA website before my sugar crash commences. Peace out.
Things that begin with the letter “R”
Last night the women of the Rain Boots Required YA Author Tour took to the, er, podium at Cover to Cover Books in Vancouver, WA. It was a blast!
Naturally, we all wore our rain boots. And, bonus, it actually rained during the event.
We each gave a short talk and did a reading. There were about 30 people in attendance and they were a fab audience. They asked great questions and stayed afterwards to mingle.
I’m in the process of editing the video from the event and then I will post them on our YouTube channel, so be on the lookout for that!
Of course we posed with our books! Rebecca Knight, Angela Carlie, Me, Lisa Nowak
Our next event is this Friday at the West Linn Public Library in West Linn, OR. It runs from 6:30-8:15. Stop by if you’re close! Angela, Lisa, Laura Elliot and I are all also going to be at Wordstock at the Oregon Covention Center this weekend, the 8th and 9th. Tickets are cheap! $7 for one day and $10 for two days.
Row80 Rownd four begins tomorrow! I don’t know how productive I’ll be this round, but whatevs, it’s fun and I always get more done than I think I will. There’s going to be a killer Row80 Twitter Party on Wednesday. Many fun shenanigans and giveaway action to be had. Be there or be square.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend, folks. I’m off to make business cards, which I should have had ready for the event last night, but SuperWoman, I ain’t.
Sleepy Barracuda
I had a blast at the Heart/Def Leppard show last night. It was fun to see bands that I’ve liked since I was a kid. Sarah and I did some serious 12-year-old style rockin’ out to Pour Some Sugar On Me – as Sarah said, ”the whole reason why we’re here.” Turns out, head banging is kind of like riding a bicycle.
I’m reminded that I’m a grown-up this morning, though. Jeez Louise! My neck is killing from the aforementioned rocking and my back aches from sitting cross-legged on the grass for four hours. Also, I didn’t get home until 12:30 and will probably have to have a nap.
I’ve got a guest post over at Kait Nolan’s blog today where I talk about how I write YA and stuff for grown-ups at the same time. It’s the basis for the YA talk I’m giving on the Rain boots Required YA Author Tour, so thanks to Kait for helping me come up with an awesome topic!
You youngins go check it out while I pop a Diet Coke and try to become a functional human being again.
La la la, whatever and #ROW80
This is a photo of Charlize Theron in the new movie, Young Adult, from the peeps who made Juno:
When I first saw this it made me feel funny. It made me feel squeamish and…called out. Replace that dog with a satchel of Diet Coke and the Hello Kitty t-shirt with the Mickey Mouse t-shirt my friend Kristen got me at a yard sale junior year of high school that I still wear, and yeah, they pretty much got it right.
Every time I’m cruisin’ in my minivan and car dancing to that Hot Chelle Rae song - complete with a killin’ it on the dance floor fantasy – the photo of Charlize pops into my head.
I’m 36, I have two kids, the aforementioned minivan and I should be, I don’t know, listening to the new Wilco. Strangely enough, that was the music I listened to in high school!
So, how did I get this way? I blame Zellie. After being stuck in her head for seven years, I’ve immatured.
Good for the YA/New Adult writing career, not so much for grown-up stories. If I’m ever going to finish the DoS series, I’m totes going to have to start wearing slacks and gently grooving to easy listening.
Say it ain’t so! La la la, whatever.
#ROW80 update: Monday- I wrote a single paragraph over the course of six hours due to the kids being all up in my grill hopped up on popsicles. Household chores have gone to hell. Tuesday – I decided I hated the beginning of Takeover, wrote a new one of about 300 words, decided I hated it more, read over all of Takeover that I’ve written so far, decided I liked it, added another 200 words before my writing time was up and then I researched shotguns. For the story.
And maybe the possum family that likes to chill on the back patio.
Kidding!
Clearly I had tons to write about. Check y’all later.
What’s for dinner and #ROW80 update
I’m supposed to be making dinner because I vowed to start making all of our meals so that we didn’t eat so much processed food, but I kinda wish I had a bag o’ taquitos in the freezer at the moment. I’m sure the kids, and my husband for that matter, would rather have those than the chicken breast and salad I have planned. I know, I know, I’m not a short order cook. (Not anymore, at least) I’m also not the type of person who enjoys throwing perfectly good chicken breast in the trash. Our dog Chief has been eating well lately.
I hadn’t planned on writing a ROW80 update today because I don’t really have anything to report. I did finally deal with all of the Zellie business, adding them to Google Books today, so that’s out of the way.
I read over the DoS stories again to make more notes for Takeover and will start putting words on the page for it tomorrow. After I finished the note taking, I uploaded the stories to Smashwords and Barnes and Noble again because I’d found a few typos and my website address was still the old one. I’ll do Kindle after dinner, as it aggravates me the most and I’ll require sustenance.
So, look, it’s like week three of ROW80 and I haven’t even started working on what I’m supposed to be working on. I’m not worried, although I am making an addendum to my goals.
A super freaking exciting addendum! (What, they can to be exciting!)
Takeover starts tomorrow. It gets worked on every day for an hour. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’ll be writing the pilot script for Glimpse.
I’ve had a bit of luck.
My friend that is the head of my local community theatre is an Assistant Director on films. She also used to AD television shows. (Ever heard of the X-files?) Anyway, we went out for frozen yogurt the other night and I was hoping that she could give me some tips on how to write a television script. I’ve written plays, but it’s not the same.
The conversation went even better than expected. Not only did she give me some tips, but she made the idea of my wanting to do this whole tv thang seem plausible. She’s going to read my script and help me make sure it’s up to par AND she’s going to help me with finding a production company.
It’s like I have an agent, except she lives down the street from me and our kids get together for playdates. I’ve officially kicked that funk from a few weeks back in the ladyballs (that’s for you Vicki) and I don’t expect to see it for a while!
Okay, time to make chicken and salad. I’m sure if I bribe the kids with one of my emergency gummy worms I can get them to eat a few bites. Whatever works, people.
